Expert: Obama's Afghanistan Strategy Recipe for Failure

8 Jan 2014

The Obama administration’s Afghanistan strategy will fail because the Afghan forces will not be able to maintain security and deal with a resurgence of the Taliban in the their county once the U.S.-NATO-led coalition leaves, according to an expert.

Breitbart News asked Nasir Shansab, the Afghanistan expert, after he spoke at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. if the U.S. will succeed under the Obama administration’s Afghanistan plan to end the combat mission in 2014 and leave behind a residual force to assist and train the Afghan forces.

“No,” he responded, “because the Afghan army will collapse. It will not work. It will take longer for the collapse to come but it will come.”

During his speech, he was asked by Voice of America to comment on Former Defense Department Secretary Robert Gates indicating in his new memoir, Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War, that President Obama is not committed to his own Afghanistan strategy.

I think President Obama is “fed up with Afghanistan,” responded Mr. Shansab, adding that “nothing that he did will really help.”

Once the U.S. and NATO forces withdraw from Afghanistan there will be “civil war and the Taliban will return,” warned the expert.

He noted that the Afghan National Security Force, which includes the national army and police, is incapable of sustaining security after the U.S.-NATO coalition leaves the country.

“Afghanistan is a failed state and the United States is in danger of losing the war,” he added.

According to Shansab, the country is the same failed state that it was when the U.S. invaded the country in October 2001.

“I think that if the United States doesn’t take a drastic step, it has already failed. I think the war is already lost, its going to be,” he said.

Shansab told attendees that if the U.S. wants to get out of there with its “head high,” it’s going to have to abolish the current system of government, which suffers from “endemic” corruption, install a temporary interim government, clean up the national policy and army, establish a stable economy, and introduce democracy again because Afghans misunderstand that concept.

More than seven out of every 10 U.S. military fatalities in Afghanistan have taken place under Obama. The president escalated the war right after taking office in February 2009. There have been 2,164 U.S. deaths since the conflict started in October 2001, according to the latest Associated Press count.

Mr. Shansab’s comments echoed the National Intelligence Estimate, with input from 16 U.S. government agencies, that was recently mentioned by The Washington Post.

According to the estimate, U.S. gains will be lost by 2017 to a resurgence of the Taliban and other power players in Afghanistan.

Mr. Shansab was at the National Press Club advertising his recently published novel set in Afghanistan, Silent Trees, and discussing the current U.S.-Afghanistan relations and situation on the ground.

He advised the Reagan administration during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and recently addressed the British Parliament House in London on the current situation in Afghanistan.